Edge is not the only one browser with multithreaded architecture, nor is it the only one based on Chromium, but Microsoft has decided to publish a very good and simple explanation of why opening a single tab in Edge results in so many running processes.
Like Google Chrome, other Chromium-based browsers, and Firefox itself, modern browsers are mostly multi-threaded and resource hungry. But this is not in vain, running so many processes at the same time makes the browser more stable and secure, and if you wonder what are all those processes that you see in the list in the Task Manager if you only have two tabs open, this is the explanation:
When a single tab can run a dozen processes
In the example above, a browser window is shown with a single open tab and two active extensions. Each arrow points to a different item that needs to run a different process.
Each extension that we have active will execute its own process, for example. Whereas if there is a plugin necessary to view the content, as in the case of Flash, that plugin will execute another one.
But on top of that, we have a process for the browser framework, a process for the GPU to help display graphics, a rendering process that runs code from the web, a process to help with network requests, a process for audio playback, and a process for monitoring the health of Microsoft Edge.
All this is necessary to show a single website in the browser and it is easy to do accounts and see how all those threads can easily multiply when we start to open more tabs.
Each ad you see on a website can run its own process
By design, the multithreaded architecture divides the browser into different processes. You have the browser processes as such they are responsible for managing windows and tabs, and controls such as the back button or the address bar.
You have the rendering processes, that is, those that control how the website code is rendered or displayed on the page. These are the ones that manage the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc. The amount of resources they use depends on the content, that is, on the website we visit.
The GPU processes They are the ones that connect the browser with your graphics card to help the fast rendering of the pages. The utilitarian processes They are the ones that help things like audio playback, network services, video capture, data decoding, etc.
Along with these are the plugin and extension processes that are active and depends on the code of each one of them. And finally, there are the crashpad driver processes, that is, those that monitor the health of each process within Microsoft Edge. These processes help the browser to capture and transmit crash reports to Microsoft’s servers.
When we open a website that has ads, each of those ads runs its own rendering process. Ads coming from the same domain share a process, but if they come from another domain, then they have an individual process.
Ads are usually inserted on the web using something called a “subframe” or subframe, this complicates things a bit more, since sometimes there are subframes that are not visible to the user and can generate additional processes.
The advantage of this bunch of processes is …?
The two main reasons a browser uses this architecture are: security and reliability. The first is very important since each of those running processes is isolated.
This means that if malware tries to exploit a process, it will be very difficult for it to escape from that process to affect others and to be able to take control of the machine, since each process has very restricted access to the operating system.
The other advantage is reliability, since each process works separately, if one fails, only that one fails. The rest of the browser, and its other tabs and processes will continue to work stably even if a process hangs in another tab.
The other advantage is that by isolating each process we can see ourselves from the task manager, which processes consume more resources. If we press the keys SHIFT + ESC From Microsoft Edge, we can open the browser’s internal task manager and from there explore the consumption made by each website, each extension and each thread that they execute.
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